The technology disclosed herein generally relates to systems and methods for detecting and locating an aircraft in distress. More particularly, the technology disclosed herein relates to integrated aircraft distress system architectures capable of providing emergency location functionality.
Most commercial airliners are equipped with fixed Emergency Locator Transmitters (ELTs) that broadcast beacons and satellite uplinks in the case of an emergency to enable search and rescue crews to find the aircraft. Current ELT units are significantly limited in locating crash sites due to their basic concept of operations of activating after a crash has occurred. There are similar proposals for enhanced ELTs with pre-crash triggering capability, but these involve new ELTs and significant aircraft impacts and are likely to take a considerable period of time to develop and deploy and will probably entail significant installation and integration costs.
The foregoing shortcomings can be addressed by providing low-impact, low-cost approaches for enhanced pre-crash activation using current ELTs and emergency detection infrastructure with enhancements to facilitate earlier and wide adoption of improved emergency location capabilities.